Obama’s proposed IRS rules to limit tax-exempt status concern liberals, too

Opposition grows from both sides

Washington Times, by Stephen Dinan, February 24, 2014

The Obama administration’s proposed crackdown on tea party and other nonprofit groups that want to play a role in politics is quietly crumbling as opposition builds across the political spectrum to new IRS rules.

Almost all of the nearly 70,000 public comments submitted as of Monday night were vehemently opposed to the proposal, which would limit the ability of social welfare nonprofits — those organized under 501(c)(4) of the tax code — to even talk about candidates in the two months before an election.

Read more! 

Proposed IRS rules for non-profits - limiting free speech!

See the video:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2zM_2DrAkxY&feature=youtu.be

We Are No Longer A Representative Republic

Tea Party Nation, by David DeGerolamo on February 12, 2014

Congress approved the elimination of the debt ceiling today and the pResident is expected to sign it quickly into law. The Republican "leadership" in both the House (John Boehner) and the Senate (Mitch McConnell) supported this measure to abandon their fiduciary responsibility to spend our money without any oversight or restraint.

If our elected officials are not representing their constituents, the Constitution or the rule of law, how can any believe that we are a representative Republic? And once we accept the reality, what is our course of action? The government has already labelled Constitutionalists, Christians and veterans as domestic terrorists. The IRS has targeted selected individuals and Tea Party groups without any repercussions. The NSA has implemented an illegal surveillance system that is the envy of every repressive regime in the world.

READ MORE.  

IRS Proposed Regulations: An Assault on Free Speech

From Tea Party Patriots!

The Internal Revenue Service has proposed new regulations to govern 501c4 organizations like Tea Party Patriots. Last year we learned that the IRS was targeting groups like ours because we want to rein in the over-spending/over-regulating government, uphold the constitution, and promote free markets.

Ultimately thousands of Americans were silenced and harassed for their beliefs. With these new regulations, the silencing will be part of the regulatory code of the IRS. Right now the IRS is accepting comments on the proposed regulations and we need to take action!

We need to flood the IRS with comments, we need to contact our elected officials, and we need to pressure the Congressional committees that oversee the IRS. The deadline for comments at the IRS is February 27th, so we must have a continuous effort between now and then to stop this assault on the first amendment.

MORE.  

Tea Party Patriots  have launched a petition calling for the removal of Representative John Boehner as Speaker of the House. Visit www.firethespeaker.com/tpp to sign the petition.

Republicans renew ObamaCare battle after latest mandate delay

Fox News, February 11, 2014

“Administration officials dispute that this is happening on any large scale. Further, Treasury officials said Monday that businesses will be told to "certify" that they are not shedding full-time workers simply to avoid the mandate. Officials said employers will be told to sign a "self-attestation" on their tax forms affirming this, under penalty of perjury.”

Republicans renewed their calls to delay or repeal ObamaCare Monday after the Obama administration announced another delay in the requirement for businesses to provide health coverage to workers, giving some employers a reprieve next year while phasing in the mandate for others. 

The administration had already delayed the implementation of the so-called employer mandate by a year, initially pushing the requirements off until 2015 -- past the midterm elections. In a concession to business, though, Treasury Department officials announced Monday that the administration would not enforce the rules across the board next year. 

"Once again, the president is giving a break to corporations while individuals and families are still stuck under the mandates of his health care law. And, once again, the president is rewriting law on a whim," House Speaker John Boehner said in a statement. "If the administration doesn't believe employers can manage the burden of the law, how can struggling families be expected to?" 

MORE.

Congressional Investigation: Treasury, IRS, HHS Conspired To Create An Unauthorized, Half-Trillion Dollar Entitlement

You really need to read the full article to get the details and the impact!

~Lynn

Forbes, Michael F. Cannon, February 10, 2014

Last week, two congressional committees issued a little-noticed report detailing how Treasury Department, Internal Revenue Service, and Health and Human Services officials conspired to create a massive new entitlement not authorized anywhere in federal law.

In the summer of 2012, the House of Representatives’ Committee on Oversight & Government Reform and Committee on Ways & Means launched an investigation to determine “whether IRS and Treasury conducted an adequate review of the statute and legislative history prior to coming to [the] conclusion that [the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act's] premium subsidies would be allowed in federal exchanges.” Over the next 18 months, the committees held numerous hearings with senior Treasury and IRS officials, while investigative staff conducted interviews with key agency attorneys responsible for developing the regulations in question. Investigators also reviewed what few documents Treasury and IRS officials allowed them to see.

Here is what seven key Treasury and IRS officials told investigators.

BEN CARSON: OBAMA OFFICIALS 'ACTING LIKE GESTAPO'

'We're dealing with an extremely corrupt administration'

WND, by Joseph Farah, February 7, 2014

WASHINGTON – Dr. Ben Carson, the brain surgeon turned popular political analyst, told WND Obama administration officials are “acting like the Gestapo” with the Justice Department indictment of Dinesh D’Souza coupled with the Internal Revenue Service’s political targeting of the administration’s critics.

“I believe we are dealing with an extremely corrupt administration,” he said.

Dr. Carson himself became the subject of an IRS audit after criticizing Barack Obama’s policies at the annual National Prayer Breakfast in Washington last year.

Read more!  

'IRS PROBE A SHAM, NONEXISTENT'

Tea-party lawyer tells Congress scandal 'real,' blasts Obama claim

 

By Garth Kant, WND, February 6, 2014

 

WASHINGTON — “The IRS scandal is not over. It is continuing to this day. And the Department of Justice investigation is a sham. It is a nonexistent investigation,” a high-powered Washington attorney testified before Congress this morning.

Attorney Cleta Mitchell, who represents many tea-party groups, blasted President Obama’s claim on Sunday that there is no IRS scandal, and his insistence that there was “not even a smidgen of corruption” in the agency’s targeting of conservative groups applying for tax-exempt status.

“The IRS scandal is not just a bone-headed bunch of bureaucrats in some remote office, contrary to what the president of the United States told the American people,” she said.

Read more!  

Why I Submitted a Comment Objecting to the IRS Proposed Rule Targeting 501(c)(4) Groups

By Loren Heal, FreedomWorks, February 5, 2014

The Internal Revenue Service is attempting to change the standards for tax exempt status for 501(c)(4) groups. Rather than sticking to enforcing the will of Congress, the IRS, with the full blessing of the political operation in the White House, wants to ensure they won't have to harass conservative and tea party groups about their tax exempt status applications, because those groups won't even bother to apply. They need to hear from America.

Following its targeting of tea party and conservative groups in the runup to the 2012 election, the IRS now wants to codify into regulatory law the organization's illegal and tyrannical behavior. The rules are meant not just to stifle free speech, which would be bad enough, but to favor progressive groups over conservative and libertarian ones.

After initially calling the IRS targeting "outrageous," President Obama shifted to calling it a "phony scandal."  The White House and its allies in Congress have worked hard in favor of the new targeting. 

READ MORE.

CHUCK SCHUMER CALLS FOR IRS TO CRACK DOWN ON TEA PARTY FUNDING

The Blaze, Becket Adams, January 24, 2014

Sen. Chuck Schumer (D-N.Y.) said Thursday that the Internal Revenue Service should be used more aggressively to keep Tea Party funding in check, explaining that this would help “weaken” and “exploit” the conservative movement.

Schumer during remarks to the Center for American Progress argued that Tea Party groups have an unfair financial advantage over left-leaning groups because of the Supreme Court’s 2010 Citizens United decision, at one point even suggesting that President Barack Obama go around Congress to impose stricter campaign finance laws.

CONTINUED.

Help stop IRS shutdown of voter guides, voter registration drives

These rules could filter down to churches, simply at the whim of the IRS, basically silencing conservatives and Christians for exercising their patriotic and civic freedoms

Canada Free Press By News on the Net American Family Association, Friday, January 24, 2014 

The IRS is proposing regulations that will give them the authority to restrict voter guides, legislative scorecards, get-out-the-vote campaigns and even the voter registration activities of non-profit groups by defining such civic engagement as “candidate-related political activity.”

Many, including AFA, believe these rules are an attempt to shut down conservative organizations like AFA, Family Research Council, Concerned Women for America and the Tea Party.

READ MORE.

SCORE ONE FOR OBAMACARE

Human Event, by Lawson Bader, January 20, 2014

Score one for Obamacare. Last week, a federal court struck down one of the major legal challenges to the Affordable Care Act. Washington, D.C. District judge Paul Friedman, ruling in Halbig v. Sebelius, upheld an IRS regulation that extended the law’s insurance premium subsidies and employer mandate to the 36 “refusenik” states—those which had decided not to set up their own health insurance exchanges. Under the Obamacare legislation, subsidies were meant for users of state exchanges. But now, people in those states who sign up for health insurance on the federal exchange can get subsidies.

This was disappointing to those of us who thought the court should strike down the subsidies. But this game isn’t over. A similar case is pending in Virginia, where a decision is expected any day, and two states have filed similar legal challenges as well

READ MORE:  http://www.humanevents.com/2014/01/20/score-one-for-obamacare/

FBI, dragging feet on IRS probe, finally contacts tea party groups Contacts were due 7 months ago

The Washington Times, by Stephan Dinan, January 9, 2014

The FBI finally has begun to contact some of the tea party groups targeted by the Internal Revenue Service for inappropriate scrutiny in the first public signs that the administration’s criminal investigation is progressing.

A lawyer representing some of the tea party groups that battled the IRS for tax-exempt status told The Washington Times that a “small number” of his clients were recently contacted, seven months after the investigation was supposed to have begun.

The progress was revealed a day after The Times reported that the Justice Department lawyer who is leading the investigation into the IRS, Barbara Kay Bosserman, has donated more than $6,000 to President Obama’s presidential campaigns — a move that, for many Republicans, has called into question the entire investigation.

“They say the fox isn’t good to guard the henhouse; the fox is probably not good to investigate the henhouse, either,” said Sen. Rand Paul, Kentucky Republican. “I think these investigations need to be done by independent people outside of the administration.”

Read more.  

IRS to get 'license to kill' groups that oppose Obama agenda

The Washington Times, January 7, 2014 — The Internal Revenue Service is getting a special new power: a “license to kill” group that oppose the Obama agenda. James Bond’s license to kill isn’t nearly as broad.

The power to tax is the power to destroy. Its new powers will let the IRS destroy certain groups, especially those connected to the Tea Party, by imposing a tax on their work and messages during campaign seasons. Even the value of volunteer work could be taxed.

Suspicion traces the plan directly to President Barack Obama, since he personally met with IRS chief counsel William Wilkins — an Obama political appointee and long-time supporter — in the Roosevelt Room of the White House on April 23, 2012, two days before the IRS issued its key internal directives to target Tea Party and other conservative groups.

Now, unless Congress acts quickly to block them, new IRS regulations will deliver a death penalty to many of almost 100,000 grass-roots non-profits known as 501(c)(4) groups. They often provide information to the public about political issues, befitting their tax requirement to benefit social welfare.

The IRS wants to create a new bureaucratic definition that re-labels those common voter information activities by re-naming them “candidate-related political activity.” For short, IRS calls it CRPA, but CRAP would fit better.

This is actually a gag rule. But the IRS’s new speech restrictions do not apply to labor unions, trade associations, political parties, or other non-profit groups such as 501(c)(3)’s. The impact is limited to the 501(c)(4)’s, which are the favorite vehicle for Tea Party groups.

The Left also has 501(c)(4) non-profits which could be muzzled by the new rules. But the Obama Administration is notorious for selective enforcement, meaning it could choose to give a pass to friendly groups while it puts conservatives out of business. They could use this in efforts to shut down groups like the Faith and Freedom Coalition, Club for Growth, Americans for Prosperity and the National Rifle Association, while ignoring People for the American Way, American Civil Liberties Union, USAction and the Democratic Leadership Council.

Here’s how the IRS’s new license to kill would work:

OBAMA DONOR TO HEAD IRS TEA PARTY TARGETING INVESTIGATION

Breitbart, January 8, 2014

The attorney heading the internal investigation into potential unfair targeting of conservative groups by the IRS is a frequent and significant donor to both the Democratic National Committee and President Obama, Rep. Darrell Issa revealed today, in what he calls a "startling conflict of interest" that jeopardizes the investigation.

Rep. Issa, Chairman of the House Oversight and Government Reform Committee, sent a letter today to Attorney General Eric Holder revealing new information that reached the committee on who is conducting the internal investigations at the IRS regarding the inappropriate targeting of conservative groups. Seeking an explanation as to why the FBI has been unresponsive to the committee, Rep. Issa noted that current and former IRS officials revealed Barbara Bosserman, a trial attorney within the IRS's Civil Rights Commission, is leading the internal investigation.

CONTINUE READING.

Tea partyers launch counterattack on IRS nonprofit rules

Washington Times, January 7

Tea party groups are rallying their troops for a fight over the new rules the IRS is carving out on how to regulate tax-exempt groups that participate in political activities.

ABC reported that tea party groups were caught off guard when the Treasury Department and Internal Revenue Service rolled out the proposed rule changes before the Thanksgiving break and now they are calling on members of the grassroots movement to weigh in on the proposed changes before the end of a 90-day comment period.

“They seem hell bent to do whatever they’re setting out to do because of the way they issued the rules and the fact that the comment period happens during the holiday season, Matt Kibbe, president of FreedomWorks, told ABC.  “I think changing the rules in an election year is extraordinarily unfair and unprecedented,” he said.  ABC reported that more than 10,000 people have responded to the call to arm by submitting their comments, which would be looked at by the IRS as it considers the new regulations.

Read more! 

New IRS rule could cut into restaurant workers’ tips

Even as President Obama and progressive activists are trying to sell the nation on hiking the national minimum wage to help restaurant workers and other low-wage employees, the Internal Revenue Service is seemingly determined to make life harder for those same workers.

A change in tax policy implemented Jan. 1 will prevent restaurant workers from collecting automatic gratuities — the added 18 percent fee many restaurants charge to groups of eight or more — as part of their tips. Instead, that added fee will be included in their payroll, meaning workers have to wait up to two weeks to get that extra cash and must pay additional taxes on it.

It means less money in servers’ pockets and more for the federal government.

More here! 

Couple helps wounded warriors, now owes $10K in taxes

THIS MAKES MY BLOOD BOIL!  I am from this very expensive county--it is not what it used to be!

Obama and his IRS goons don’t want to help out those that serve.
Check it out:  Va. couple surprised with giant tax bill after setting up retreat for wounded vets.

VIDEO AND MORE!

Issa: FBI impeding inquiry into IRS targeting of conservative groups

The House’s chief investigator says the FBI is stonewalling his inquiry into whether the agency and the Internal Revenue Service targeted conservative group True the Vote for special scrutiny, and Rep. Darrell E. Issa is now threatening subpoenas to pry loose the information from FBI Director James B. Comey Jr. 

Mr. Issa, California Republican, and Rep. Jim Jordan, Ohio Republican, are leading the House Oversight and Government Reform Committee’s IRS inquiry. They also said the FBI is refusing to turn over any documents related to its own investigation into the IRS, which began in the days after an auditor’s report revealed the tax agency had improperly targeted tea party groups for special scrutiny.

Six months after it began, the FBI’s investigation has resulted in no release of information. The congressmen said the FBI even rescinded an offer for an in-person briefing with the assistant director in charge of the investigation. The reversal, after the FBI consulted with the Justice Department, suggests political meddling, the two investigators said.

READ MORE:  http://www.washingtontimes.com/news/2013/dec/2/lawmakers-suspect-fbi-is-impeding-irs-inquiry-targ/#ixzz2mQ3N32zJ

Americans’ personal data shared with CIA, IRS, others in security probe

WASHINGTON — U.S. agencies collected and shared the personal information of thousands of Americans in an attempt to root out untrustworthy federal workers that ended up scrutinizing people who had no direct ties to the U.S. government and simply had purchased certain books.

Federal officials gathered the information from the customer records of two men who were under criminal investigation for purportedly teaching people how to pass lie detector tests. The officials then distributed a list of 4,904 people – along with many of their Social Security numbers, addresses and professions – to nearly 30 federal agencies, including the Internal Revenue Service, the CIA, the National Security Agency and the Food and Drug Administration. Although the polygraph-beating techniques are unproven, authorities hoped to find government employees or applicants who might have tried to use them to lie during the tests required for security clearances. Officials with multiple agencies confirmed that they’d checked the names in their databases and planned to retain the list in case any of those named take polygraphs for federal jobs or criminal investigations.

It turned out, however, that many people on the list worked outside the federal government and lived across the country. Among the people whose personal details were collected were nurses, firefighters, police officers and private attorneys, McClatchy learned. Also included: a psychologist, a cancer researcher and employees of Rite Aid, Paramount Pictures, the American Red Cross and Georgetown University.

Read more here: http://www.mcclatchydc.com/2013/11/14/208438/americans-personal-data-shared.html#storylink=cpy